In other words, everybody is equally screwed because of the economy. The only difference is that AMD is small, so the financial hit is substantially more damaging compared to Intel where they have enough cash and assets to weather out the storm.

I believe AMD is capable of making money even in this economy. They honestly have good products at good price points but over manufacturing Llano chips really killed them. They really could be making money but the continuously shoot themselves in the foot.

As the underdog to Intel's massive market share and deep pockets, the last thing they needed was to open a second battle front against a company like Nvidia. Now rather than being able to focus their R&D capital solely on creating good value processors they have to look into their crystal ball to see whether it'll be procs, vid cards, or driver support which will garner them the best return.

I accept that they wanted to focus on APUs, but (again IMO) that would have been better done as a partnership rather than by taking over ATI for expertise.

As the underdog to Intel's massive market share and deep pockets, the last thing they needed was to open a second battle front against a company like Nvidia. Now rather than being able to focus their R&D capital solely on creating good value processors that they have to look into their crystal ball to see whether it'll be procs, vid cards, or driver support which will garner them the best return.

I accept that they wanted to focus on APUs, but (again IMO) that would have been better done as a partnership rather than by taking over AMD for expertise.

I'm guessing you meant to say, "taking over ATI " in that last sentence

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Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov

ATI was a customer of mine before the acquisition and AMD was afterwards, and I can truthfully say that both spent money frivolously, and that is/was their major downfall, as far as I'm concerned. I also worked on ATI's financing back in their IPO days and they were far from honest in their dealings... KY thought that it was OK to lie to research analysts about projected earnings, and he also thought it was OK to put family members into high-paying positions, even if they weren't actually doing anything. Anyway, it doesn't really matter because Intel needs to keep them afloat to have a competitor and thus not face antitrust litigation, so they will continue to back door finance them.

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Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov

ATI was a customer of mine before the acquisition and AMD was afterwards, and I can truthfully say that both spent money frivolously, and that is/was their major downfall, as far as I'm concerned. I also worked on ATI's financing back in their IPO days and they were far from honest in their dealings... KY thought that it was OK to lie to research analysts about projected earnings, and he also thought it was OK to put family members into high-paying positions, even if they weren't actually doing anything. Anyway, it doesn't really matter because Intel needs to keep them afloat to have a competitor and thus not face antitrust litigation, so they will continue to back door finance them.